The Harvest Moon Consortium

[OldSchool]

Driving me crazy

I've been experimenting with making some landscape planes for the area edges in my module, and the textures keep showing upside down. They look right in Gmax when I add them to the model, but not in the game.

I'm guessing it is something really simple that I've overlooked, but I can't figure out what. Any hints?

[lord rosenkrantz]

Uhm, make sure the "rotate texture" field is set to 0 and not 1. If that doesn't help, it could be that there are two twin overlapping meshes. In Gmax mesh #1 overlaps mesh #2, in game it happens the opposite. It's note a rare issue as deciding which overlaps which seems to be random, so you keep editing the one that is visible in Gmax while in game it has no effect because the other one is rendered instead.

If neither of those help, more ideas will be in order to fix your issues, heh.

[OldSchool]

Thanks, Lord. Neither of those turned out to be the issue and truthfully, I still have no clue what it is. I just resaved the TGA with the origin in the lower left and I can at least see it with the correct orientation.

Finally

Of course, having resolved that, I immediately ran into a scale issue where the model showed correctly in toolset, but 1/10 size in game. Just editing the MDL file directly resolved that, but I think that is about all the frustration my blood pressure can take for now.

I'm familiar enough with modelling and texturing, but this is my first real attempt at using Gmax and dealing with Aurora specific content. Obviously, I'm not grasping some of the basic methods yet.

If you know of any decent documentation for the Aurora modifiers, I would be much obliged. What I've found so far has been sparse and outdated, to say the least.

Thanks a lot.

[lord rosenkrantz]

Best place to start is DLA Custom Content Guide Wiki which also includes links to other tutorials and guides.

Regarding your issue it seems it was a problem due to the tga format the file was saved as. I had forgotten all about that, I'll try to keep it in my mental known issues list.
For sure Photoshop saves TGA in a nwn-friendly format by default. Not so PaintShop Pro (had issues in the past with it). Can't remember if the Gimp is natively NWN-friendly or not, Estelindis will surely be able to answer that though.

Happy modding.

[OldSchool]

Thanks for the link.

I'm using Gimp. When you save as a TGA, it defaults to saving a compressed image with a lower left origin. I unchecked both those options originally, and got a good texture in Gmax, but upside down in NWN. Leaving the lower left origin checked seems to work for both NWN and Gmax.

Hopefully, that was the issue, and not something I did backwards in Gmax.

Thanks.

[Chandigar]

These may or may not apply to you, but having moved from doing regular 3d renderings to NWN myself, there are a couple things you need to look out for...

If you MIRROR or UNIFORM SCALE anything, always apply a reset xform modifier to your mesh then collapse it. If you Mirror, the normals will be flipped after you reset xform so apply a normal modifier before collapsing it.

If you see stuff looking fine in the engine but screwed up in game (wrong position, wrong size) then go back and again, apply a reset xform to it before exporting again.

If you still see weird stuff and you have meshes linked to anything other than the base dummy, make sure that the parent has a unique name. You don't necessarily need a unique name for any mesh unless its a parent to something else.

If you're working on tiles, you can have all your files in the same max file, I generally have all my tiles in the same file with 1000 cm gaps in between.

tip: If you lay out your tiles this way, you can have all of the same terrain in a row, then if you select all the meshes and apply a UVW modifier at 1000x1000, it will appear exactly the same on all the tiles (because the spacing is in 1000s).

[Bannor Bloodfist]

These may or may not apply to you, but having moved from doing regular 3d renderings to NWN myself, there are a couple things you need to look out for...

If you MIRROR or UNIFORM SCALE anything, always apply a reset xform modifier to your mesh then collapse it. If you Mirror, the normals will be flipped after you reset xform so apply a normal modifier before collapsing it.

Ahhh... that explains a few things I have run into! Thanks Chandigar for pointing out my error(s). But I am NOT following your instruction on how to apply a 'normal' modifier? What is a 'normal' modifier?

If you're working on tiles, you can have all your files in the same max file, I generally have all my tiles in the same file with 1000 cm gaps in between.

tip: If you lay out your tiles this way, you can have all of the same terrain in a row, then if you select all the meshes and apply a UVW modifier at 1000x1000, it will appear exactly the same on all the tiles (because the spacing is in 1000s).

This is another one that I am not able to figure out how to do. I select all the meshes... but all I have in the modifier choice list is UVWMap Add, and UVWMap Clear... so I am not sure exactly what you mean by this instruction.

[OldSchool]

These may or may not apply to you, but having moved from doing regular 3d renderings to NWN myself, there are a couple things you need to look out for...

If you MIRROR or UNIFORM SCALE anything, always apply a reset xform modifier to your mesh then collapse it. If you Mirror, the normals will be flipped after you reset xform so apply a normal modifier before collapsing it.

...

Hey, thanks for the tips. I did scale the plane in Gmax without resetting the xform, which would account for my scaling issue. Hopefully, I'll get the hang of this soon and not bug y'all too much with questions.

It's a bit of a learning curve transitioning from rendering scenes to making usable game assets, but so far it has been fun. (except when I spend 2 days doing a 5 minute test)

[lord rosenkrantz]

Ahhh... that explains a few things I have run into! Thanks Chandigar for pointing out my error(s). But I am NOT following your instruction on how to apply a 'normal' modifier? What is a 'normal' modifier?

From the Modifiers menu ---> Mesh Editing ---> Normal Modifier. Then check the Flip Normals box, and it'll turn all your faces upside down. On a side note I never had to apply it after a mirroring (I use the Mirror function from the Tools menu), as I never got inverted faces as a result.

This is another one that I am not able to figure out how to do. I select all the meshes... but all I have in the modifier choice list is UVWMap Add, and UVWMap Clear... so I am not sure exactly what you mean by this instruction.

Apply UVW Map an all your selected meshes, and you'll notice that the texture will be severely stretched. It's normal, at that point the parameters panel should be already set on "planar" mapping. You'll have to modify the values in the Length and Width fields, setting them both to either 500 or 1000 (those are the values that work best with ground textures for example). Always input multiples or fractions of 1000 however, or your texture edges won't match the tile edges and you get seams.

Another useful option is to set the mapping to Box and input the same value as Length and Width in the Height field. That way your mapping will be based on a cube shape, which allows you to quick map things like bricks and any ground terrains that have steps and similar (good for mapping the stone blocks of a pyramid for example )

[Chandigar]

Hey, thanks for the tips. I did scale the plane in Gmax without resetting the xform, which would account for my scaling issue. Hopefully, I'll get the hang of this soon and not bug y'all too much with questions.

It's a bit of a learning curve transitioning from rendering scenes to making usable game assets, but so far it has been fun. (except when I spend 2 days doing a 5 minute test)

Yea, once you start picking up the tricks, it gets addictive I'd probably recommend trying to do everything as manually as possible, there aren't really any NECESSARY functions in NWMAX that you can't do manually in 3dsmax except for some useful time savers like automatic minimap creation and animation reset.